The Old Dispensation Read online

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  “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.” – The Book of Revelation

  1.

  The Yom Kippur–class Adjudicator Starship Vey Is Mir left the planet of New Jerusalem at twelve oh five hundred hours Temple Mean Time, en route to the planet Kadesh.

  2.

  This much we know. This much is logged.

  Much of what transpired is guesswork.

  3.

  “What do you remember?” we ask the man suspended over the sacrificial water of the mikveh. We are deep under the Exilarch’s palace. Shadows flit in the dim red light of the stones set deep into the walls. The air is humid, like a swamp. We think of Capernaum where the green Abominations live. There should be no secrets between us, not here. This is a safe place.

  The prisoner is suspended in chains above the murky water. Tiny microscopic organisms swim in that polluted pool, Shayol bacteria, and the prisoner squirms. He knows what they are, what they do. He is afraid.

  The prisoner is naked. We examine his body, dispassionately, in the dim red light. His body is a map of old scars, whip and burn marks, gouging and bullets. His body, too, has been modified in past years, in accordance with the forbidden teachings of Rabbi Abulafia, the heretic. This was done by pontifical consent, for did not the Mishna say that the Shabbat may be broken when life is at stake? By which we mean, that this man, who we call Shemesh, was duly blessed by us as an Adjudicator with a license to spoil the Shabbat, by which we mean, well, you follow our drift, we are sure. Certain forbidden technologies were embedded in his flesh, for though he was himself an Abomination nevertheless he performed a holy task in our name.

  We are the Exilarch.

  We say, “We are most concerned.”

  The bound man, suspended upside down over the water where the murderous little creatures of Shayol swim hungrily, makes a rude sound. He uses a rude a word. We are displeased. A scan of his brain pattern reveals disturbing new alignments. We must love him very much, we think, for he is still alive, awaiting our displeasure.

  We sigh.

  “Child…” we say.

  “Go to Hell.”

  “But we have been there, to that awful planet,” we say, laughing. “And the Treif of Hell-2 will be dealt with as well, in due course. Let us go back, Shemesh, dear Shemesh. Let us go back to when we last saw you.”

  “I can tell you nothing,” he says, “that you do not already know.”

  We are troubled, but we try not to show it.

  “Please,” he says. “Let me down.”

  “Tell us about Kadesh.”

  His face twists in pain. “It orbits too close to its sun,” he says. “There is no water, no shade. Nothing good ever came of Kadesh.”

  “We,” we say, mildly, “were born on Kadesh.”

  The man laughs. His laughter is not demented nor tortured, but seems genuine, even pleasant. It upsets us. We lower him down and he stops laughing when the water touches the top of his skull. The tiny little organisms swarm over his scalp and into his ears and his nose and he begins to scream. We lower him further, submerging him in the water, until we choke off the sound.

  4.

  The man called Shemesh came to the Exilarch’s palace before he left for Kadesh. It is a beautiful place, our palace, we think, less a building and more of a small, bustling town in the heart of New Jerusalem, a complex of offices and temples, housing and stores. It is the very heart of this most holy glorious Intermedium of ours, and the Holy of Holies within is more than 5000 years old, and is a remnant of the old place, of the world we left behind. But you must not know yet of such Mysteries. That place can be visited only by an Exilarch, and we are 3956th of that title.

  We received Shemesh in our private offices. Our Massadean guards escorted him into the presence and withdrew. We admired them, these hardy warriors of ours, in their armour with the red Star of David enclosed within a circle. We have many enemies, both within and without. We are ever vigilant: against rebels and Abominations, Obscenities, Treif … For beyond the light of the Intermedium, ever present, is the shadow of the Ashmoret Laila and we must guard, always we must guard against incursions.

  “Exilarch.”

  He performed a perfunctory bow.

  “Shemesh. Thank you for coming to see us.”

  “I serve at the pleasure of the Exilarch,” he said. He was not a man given to many words, you understand. We hadn’t fashioned him this way. This man, this Shemesh, was an instrument, or so we saw it, of our will.

  “A small matter has risen,” we said, smoothly.

  “Of course.”

  “When was your last mission?”

  “Three cycles ago,” he said. “Ashmoret III.”

  “Ah, yes,” we said. “You did well there.”

  “I was hunted for nights under the seeing moons,” he said, “while the Treif whispered into my mind, a soft and unified whisper of humility and prayer…”

  “Do you doubt?” we said, sharply. Perhaps we regret it now. Perhaps, like any good tool, he merely needed to be re-sharpened.

  “I slaughtered them,” he said, simply; and that satisfied us.

  “On the planet Kadesh,” we said, “there is rumour of a holy man. Deep in the caves near the north pole, in the human zone of habitation, he resides. A holy man, and yet he speaks the loshon hora, the evil speech: and he defies the word of the Intermedium.”

  “Your word,” he said.

  “Our word, yes,” we agreed; a little testily. This is the problem with Adjudicators. They are not … whole. They are damaged by definition. And so they tend to mock and question, even their superiors.

  Even us.

  We tolerate it, on the whole. They have their uses, our tamed assassins, our eyes and ears. We needed Shemesh. The situation on Kadesh was troubling, yet such things are not uncommon, after all. The worlds are filled with false prophets and the speakers of evil tongues. Mostly, a simple procedure heals the body politic. Think of us as surgeons, with a knife.

  “We wish for you to travel to Kadesh,” we said. “And ascertain the truth or otherwise of these allegations. Do what you must.”

  We waved one of our hands to dismiss him, but he remained put.

  “You wish me to spoil the Shabbat?” he said.

  “Spoil,” we said, “with extreme unction.”

  5.

  The Yom Kippur–class Adjudicator Starship Vey Is Mir left the planet of New Jerusalem at twelve oh five hundred hours Temple Mean Time, en route to the planet Kadesh. This much we know. Much
of what transpired is guesswork.

  She was a relic of the Second Maccabean War. A swift old war bird, she was equipped with a Smolin Drive, which was engaged as soon as it passed the heliosphere. It attained light speed and shot into the dark of galactic space.

  Light, we understand, does not travel at quite the same speed here as it did in the place we left behind. The journey between planets is swift, here. It took the ship 45 hours to reach Kadesh orbit. What Shemesh did in that time, we do not know. We hope he prayed – but we rather doubted it.

  Perhaps he slept. Perhaps he studied the dossier of the man he had to kill. We knew little of this preacher, but that he called himself Ishmael. A choice of a name well fitting a renegade. We ourselves, before we became Exilarch, were born in Akalton, the second largest of the planet’s settlements, to which Shemesh himself was headed. Our childhood was happy, we remember. We loved the desert, the dry heat. New Jerusalem’s a colder place, and we have never stopped entirely marvelling at rain.

  Rain! Water that falls down from the sky! In Akalton our mother was a trader in water futures. Our father sold breeds of Zikit, the hardy lizard-like creatures native to that planet, on which we rode and hunted and transported our goods. One feels very close to God, on Kadesh. Many of our predecessors came from that planet, but equally many false prophets emerge there, then and still, and we must always watch for trouble from that region. Our Massadean forces keep a permanent base on Kadesh, but in truth, there is little they can truly do on that harsh world, where communities are ever mobile, and where the ancient polar caves provide a shelter to any manner of galactic outlaw…

  But this is not our story, this is the recording of minutes concerning the expedition of Shemesh, who is suspended over the sacrificial water, back in the air, breathing, as our appendages probe the forbidden interface that lies in the base of his brain, painfully extracting information.

  6.

  The Testament According To Shemesh, Part I

  The ship began to slow as we entered the Kadesh-Barnea system. Beside the habitable planet, there are two gas giants in the outer system, orbited by many moons, and between them and the planet Kadesh, nearby space is filled with habitats of all kinds. On Kadesh they grow the Artemisia judaica, and it is the source of much of their trade. A non-native plant, it came from that place we left behind, yet changed in the crossing. The breeds they grow on Kadesh are valued as medicine throughout the Intermedium and even in the forbidden worlds of the Ashmoret Laila on the rim; and though Kadesh is a harsh world, it is also a rich one.

  This explained, then, the profusion of habitats throughout the system, and transport ships swarmed in nearby space. Around the planet itself, in orbit, I observed numerous small satellites, way stations, and docking bays. The Vey Is Mir, however, is adapted for planetary landing, and in short order I arrived in Akalton City, where my Adjudicator badge let me pass through quarantine.

  It is a strange and melancholy place … the reddish-brown buildings looked as though they were built of the desert itself. The world smelled of dried thyme, cinnamon, and salt, for the area around the settlement was home to many salt mines, and it was this commodity, rather than the Artemisia, that was most on display as I walked through the quiet streets. Though buildings seldom came higher than two stories, nevertheless the streets, having been built close together, formed a narrow maze that felt oppressive, at times dangerous. The sun had set, and the first stars came out. It is always a shock, the first time one encounters a new sky, no matter how often one visits new planets. It provokes the strongest sense of dislocation, almost of loss.

  Wonder, too, though the sense of wonder soon fades, and one is left mostly with unease at the alien stars.

  Since the stars came out, the streets filled with people heading to temple, though many stood and prayed outside their shops or homes for Ma’ariv. The people of Kadesh wore long, flowing robes, their faces covered against the sand that always blew through the air. Many wore elaborate air filtration systems over their faces, and thus robed and masked they passed through the narrow streets of that town.

  … I had the sense of being watched.

  I picked my way carefully. The instruments deep within my skull analysed the Kadeshean’s bodies. Many carried kukri knives, long and curved and deadly. Others carried dart guns, salt revolvers, even Vipera kadesheana, those semi-domesticated, poisonous snakes which are used by the natives in deadly close combat.

  The pension I was headed to lay at the edge of the town, where Akalton ends and the desert begins. It was as I was passing the gladiatorial amphitheatre that the first attack happened…

  The amphitheatre stood behind mud-coloured walls. Though the law forbids such games, the populace, being simple folk, love them to the detriment of their duties, and so it was deemed by some former Exilarch that they should be, if not legalised, than at least managed and, naturally, taxed. Now it provided easy entertainment to otherwise pious citizens, who flocked to view bloodied spectacles of human gladiators fighting captured Treif. The area around the arena thronged, even at that hour, with disreputable characters, many armed, and so when the first blow came, I was prepared—

  I fell down and swept the assailant’s feet from under him and he fell. My knife was already in my hand and it found his heart before he had time to move. There were three more of them converging on me, two brutes who with their size could only have been Goliaths, and a small, nasty-looking angel with the mark of Cain on his brow.

  The angel took me by surprise. The angels, by which we mean messengers, emanate from the holy see in New Jerusalem. They are augmented, chosen of all the worlds for being the brightest and the most studious and pure. When still young, they are taken to the facilities deep beneath the holy see, where Talmudic engineers refashion them into beings both less, and more, than human. There is a bitter argument recorded in the Tractate Nephilim of 3812, between Rabbi Mohandes and Rabbi Gilman of the Gilmanites of Hastur-3 (of whom it was said that he always walked in shadow), as to the ascendancy of angelic souls at the time of the Final Resurrection. For Rabbi Mohandes said, Lo, that they may not arise as they have never truly lived as men. And Rabbi Gilman said, On the contrary, for they are more than men, and so they will be first to be awakened when the final shofar is blown by the Archangel Gabriel, for it will be they who will usher the new souls into the afterlife.

  But I had bigger problems than what the ancient sages thought on the issue of angels, as the small, nasty one was coming at me with a knife. It was a horrible little blade, made of bio-hazardous nanowire filaments woven together: its very whisper through the air could kill. I plugged one of the two Goliaths with a high-bore bullet to the brain and it collapsed with a grunt. I rolled backwards as the angel came at me, kicking as his arm descended. He shrieked with fury and bared small, even white teeth in a rictus of hate. In all my time serving I had only met one other angel with the mark of Cain upon its face: its protocols had been corrupted by an Ashmedai-level hostile intrusion from the Ashmoret Laila.

  How this one came to be here I couldn’t even begin to speculate. The second Goliath smashed a fist into me, sending me flying over the heads of the crowd until I crashed into a moneylender’s stall. As it came thudding after me the crowd dispersed as fast as they could. From beyond the walls of the arena came the frenzied shouts of spectators as some unlucky Treif was no doubt gored. I myself had no taste for violent spectacle.

  I rose to my feet. The angel came at me more slowly, then. Its eyes glowed with ultraviolet light and it rose above the ground, manipulating magnetic fields as it flew. The Goliath, with a smirk of triumph, blocked my escape.

  I was trapped.

  The angel hovered in the air above me. He looked down on me, a heavenly castrato with the eyes of Ashmedai itself.

  “Three times,” he intoned, in his high, youthful voice, “three times shall you be besieged, assassin, and three times you shall be tested.”

  Then he smiled, a wicked smile, and the knife grew in his
hand and became a shining sword. “Or just once, if you’re lucky.”

  And he dove at me.

  I assumed the Yona Wallach defence and as the sword swung a second time I counterattacked with an Alterman combined with a two-strike Adaf move that saw the angel fly back. As the Goliath at my back moved to contain me I twisted my body round him until I was at his back, pressing against it, and then I pushed. He screamed as my flesh burned into his own and I burrowed into his body, dislodging vertebrae and kidneys, thighbones and intestines. I made the body move, blindly groping for the angel. I heard the whisper of the blade as it connected with neck muscles and severed them. The Goliath’s head fell to the ground, bounced twice, and lay still. The angel screamed with rage. I reached for him with the giant’s arms. I was safe inside the tank-like body. Then I heard gunfire, as the local Massadean peace-keeping force arrived to save the day. The angel shrieked again, then departed. I disengaged myself slowly and painfully from the Goliath’s corpse and watched it as it crashed to the ground. I was covered in gore, dripping in slime, and in a very bad mood. I hadn’t even been on the planet one full rotation. The Massadeans had their guns trained on me and I sighed.

  “My name,” I said, “is Shemesh. I am a full level Adjudicator on a mission from the holy see…”

  As you can imagine, it took me a while to convince them.

  7.

  The Testament According To Shemesh, Part II

  I spent the night in a cell in the Massadean barracks.

  The Massada mercenaries always put me in mind of lethal mushrooms. They are, on the whole, small and wiry, and they move with a deadly sort of precision that makes even a trained operative, even a high-level Adjudicator, uneasy. In all the worlds of the Intermedium there is no one more dangerous than a Massadean. They live in barracks from childhood and train in every form of martial art and every weapon ever invented, and on their bar mitzvah they get dropped on a rim planet, a group of them, and are expected to survive a month among Amalek-level Treif. Less than half of them usually make it off-world by the time it is over and by then, they have shed more blood than the prophet Elijah when he was faced with the priests of Ba’al.